Blood and Squalor

Wretched, low-class characters living in filth and poverty. With lots of misery and blood.

Dark Cloud Press is cobbling together a short fiction anthology of horror and psychological thrillers in ebook and trade paperback. The subject matter can be anything you want, so long as it includes both blood and squalor.

We all know what blood is. It’s spilled accidentally. Or worse, on purpose—often ending in death. But squalor…

SQUALOR: n. A quality or state marked by filthiness and degradation from neglect or poverty. Synonyms: sordid, wretched, seamy, seedy.

What We're Looking For

The best example of what we’re looking for in stories for this antho is season 4, episode 2 of The X-Files, titled “Home,” which aired October 11, 1996. Find it. Watch it.

Literary examples include:

Jack Ketchum’s Off Season

Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood

Write an original story that adheres to the guidelines detailed here. Don’t be limited by this list, but here are a few examples:

Murder in a trailer park

Blackmail gone awry in the inner city

Revenge in a failed mining town

Sinister events on the rural farm

Deadly dealings on the other side of the tracks in small-town America

NOTE: We’re not looking for anything as hardcore as Off Season(be sure to study our general submission guidelines). And no slasher stories with buckets of blood, either. But blood and squalor, yes.

We want atmospheric horror in a squalid setting, or scenes under squalorous conditions, wretched characters, and a psychologically thrilling conclusion spattered with blood.

Scare us. Shock us. Make us reel.

HINT: You've got a better chance at hooking the editor if you write like Donald Westlake instead of H.P. Lovecraft.

Submission Guidelines

The anthology will contain 40,000+ words of original psychological thrillers and horror, 2500–5000 words each (3000–4000 preferred). It will be published in trade paperback and Kindle format, both available on Amazon.com.

No previously published works.

No multiple submissions.

Electronic submissions only (.doc or .docx format).

In your cover email, briefly introduce yourself, list your publication credits, and share what you’ll do to help market the book.

Examples

Updates

8/2/2017 - HINT: You've got a better chance at hooking the editor if you write like Donald Westlake instead of H.P. Lovecraft.

8/3/2017 - READ THE GUIDELINES. Study them. If your story deviates in any way from the stated requirements, query first before submitting.

8/4/2017 - The very first paragraph needs to contain a strong hook. Setting or description rarely achieve this. If the story action hasn't started by the end of page one, you'll likely get a quick rejection. We're seeing too many manuscripts that spend the first few pages describing a situation. Give us story—characters in immediate action.

8/6/2017 - Poverty and squalor must be intrinsic to your story, but we're seeing quite a few where it's way overdone. Get to the story, and quickly.